In 1997, after five years of teaching in a prison in Detroit and suffering two to three flat tires a year, I decided to transfer to another facility in another county. Filled with renewed energy and a fairly decent reputation, I thought I’d get along with staff just fine. Unfortunately, within one week I was battling the personnel department for reneging on my rate of pay. Seems that the personnel manager had a habit of decreasing the amount of money new employees were promised. I pleaded for a lateral transfer back to my old stomping ground; however, I had helped my former employers find my replacement, thus killing any chance of turning back.During my first week at my new job, I remember stepping onto the elevator in the administration building on my way to lunch. Not knowing my identity, the corrections officers ceased talking. “I’m not a federal agent, if that’s what you’re thinking,” I said, “I just transferred here from Ryan Correctional Facility. I’m a teacher.”
Still, they looked at me suspiciously and with good reason; sworn depositions were the norm around there. Three of their coworkers were arrested earlier in the week for taking bribes from inmates to smuggle in drugs, handcuff keys, and pepper spray which endangered the lives not only of the transportation staff but everyone who had contact with inmates. Two of the officers did approximately one year of jail time. The third officer, Dion Scott Koglin disappeared, until recently. According to the Detroit Free Press, he was living as Richard Bishop in Tennessee with his girlfriend and 4-month old baby. He showed a sense of relief when the FBI asked him if he knew why they were there.
Everyone makes decisions that they’ll regret sooner or later in life—but the key is to move forward no matter how dire the circumstances. After ten years of teaching at my current facility, which is double the amount of time I spent at the prison in Detroit, and after seeing employees come and go, I’m still chugging along, trying to make all the right moves, trying to survive the best way I know how.
16 comments:
Hey Jim,
your post got me to thinking. I've been in the Detroit area teaching for ten years after five years in two other cities. Given its colder than five hells, it makes me wonder, indeed, about decisions good and bad.
Keep on trucking'
I think this has been one of the more milder winters...It can get a whole lot colder still. JR I remember when this happened and could not believe that someone would put their fellow employees in jeopardy. Handcuff keys and pepper spray.The transportation officers could have been killed.
Great post. No tubes attached.
MW :-)
Jim, Keep chugging away! Like most Detroiters around here, we all keep going even though the job market has been dim. That's the only thing we can do in order to bring food on the table. --Bro, Ron
JR: I admire anyone who can "stick it out." My own resume' is more than sporadic. I've stayed in one field but not in one place. I wish I had that quality. I don't know if my decisions were totally good or totally bad, but they were what they were. At this point, I look at "what good did I do?" And hope the positive will speak for itself. Donnetta
I think that working corrections can be a fairly stressful occupation, or at least that is my perception from reading your work and talking to my friend. It must be difficult not picking up on the paranoia of the system and the frustration and anger of the inmates.
Thirty years ago, on a bright January day, I decided to give up teaching and become an honest-to-god writer.
Well. Certainly enjoyed the life.
Really bohemian.
Came back with two manuscripts which I somehow forced into print.
I see younger men on the slope side of thirty, contemplating the same thing. Mid-life crisis on the horizon.
Don't.
E.A. is right. Stay where you are.
After 30+ years of writing, I am still getting rejection slips from important houses.
I have a reputation and am very much on the horizon. But I'm not exactly at Random House.
In the the last count, I've become Rumpelstiltskin.
My poor ex-wife and family now know my name.
"Are writers really people?" one editor asked me.
Fact is, the important work had been done by age thirty.
There was this great temptation to just jump up and grab ones own tail.
Depressed yet?
There is this secret laugh.
Probably de debbil.
"Fact is, the important work had been done by age thirty."
I'm not sure I agree with Ivan here - what about Bukowski, Burgess, Chandler.... they all wrote important work wat after 30, and hadn't even started by then. That seems evident to me, and I'm not an aspiring writer at present.
Still,the basic message of keeping a job is sound..
I am haunted again and again by the observations of an acquaintance, Clifford Irving, whom I'd met in Mexico.
"When childhood is over, the things of childhood should be put away."
But Clifford Irving was still writing in those days, even if he wrote outrageous lies about working for Howard Hughes.
Ivan
Keep on keepin'on is all any of us can do.
It sounds to me like you have learned a lot about life. Not always is living with a bit of regret a bad thing. It has been my experience that sometimes regret becomes the motivation in doing things differently the next time around.
Thats really all we can do JR, our own best! I need a change myself, but one never knows what the change will bring.
:)
What worries me most is the decisons I don't make, the outcomes that happen to me because I didn't make a decision and that was in itself a decision. Ok, this sounds pretty freakin goofy so I'll shut up now.
Perseverance, Jim...you've got what it takes. I, however, have tried to delete my blog, and am now having my first real problems with Blogger...
I'll stop by now and then, but I doubt I'll start another blog any time soon. Who knows, maybe I'll need an escape hatch again over the summer, when the kids are home...:)
Cheers,
Robin
JR my son, Perseverance is everything! Keep charging and you will go far!!!!
whether you recognize it or not, despite the constant struggle to just "chug along."
From the posts I have read of yours, you are leaving a thmbprint on history.
Maybe not on the history of every inmate you encounter but some of them eventually get it and remember something you said to them or taught them and actually change. That is your thumbprint.
You may never get a chance to see it, but with a heart like yours you occasionally feel it happen, recognize that, and thats what makes your work all worth while.
I know more ex-inmates than I do prison workers and i know some of them are different, better people, because someone inside tried to help them, be better than they had been and while inside they saw that they could live in the hole or do right and see sunshine again.
So Jim, you keep on chugging along and know that in some lives you are making a difference.
Besides you taught me how to spell sepArate, thank you.
peace
TWM
Ten years is a long time. Keep it up.
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